Over the past several years, photosharing has become widely accepted by photo enthusiasts. Many websites currently exist that allow users to upload digital images to the site for storage on a server and for viewing by others over the Internet. Oftentimes, images are grouped to form an album web page so that the user can invite others to view the album web page, as opposed to each individual image.
This approach to photosharing, however, presents some disadvantages. In particular, users are required to upload digital images to the site, which can be time consuming, and the site requires extensive storage capacity to store the images of all the users, which can become expensive.
To address these concerns, the assignee of the present invention has developed a web-based peer-to-peer photosharing system in which all workstations and computers (peers) in the network store images locally and act as servers to other users on the network. A central site accessible by all the peers provides additional functionality, such as coordinating the peers, providing search capabilities for the peers, purchase order fulfillment, etc.
FIG. 1A is a block diagram illustrating the web-based peer-to-peer photosharing system. The peer-to-peer photosharing system 20 includes a photosharing P2P network 22, which comprises multiple peer servers 24 running peer node software 26 and web server software 28. The peer node and server software 24 and 26 enable the users of the computers to share images with others in the network 22 through a web browser 30 without having to upload their pictures to a web site. A novel feature of the photosharing P2P network 22 is that it provides a hybrid peer-to-peer architecture for general HTTP/web browser configuration that incorporates a central proxy server 36 to coordinate networking traffic for peers behind firewalls, thus allowing access to peers behind firewalls by other peers and by visiting computers 32 not in the network 22. The proxy server 36 provides supporting services to the peers 24 as well as providing a path through which the visiting computer 32 accesses images from the peer servers 24 via a standard web browser 30. Allowing generic HTTP access to the images hosted on peer servers located behind firewalls becomes increasingly important as virtually all corporations use firewalls, and the use of software firewalls installed on user's home systems is becoming ubiquitous.
FIG. 1B is a diagram illustrating the data paths used when an image is served from one of the peers 24 to a visiting computer 32 through the proxy server 36. The process begins when a guest initiates a request from the web browser 30 of the visiting computer 32 to view an image, which is routed to the proxy server 36 via path (A). The proxy server 36 then routes the request to the peer server 24 via path (B). The peer server 24 services the request and returns the image to the proxy server via path (C). The proxy server 36 then sends the image to the visiting computer 32 for display via path (D).
One problem with routing images through the proxy server 36 is that it requires extra bandwidth. That is, the image must be moved twice; once from the peer server 24 to the proxy server 36, and then a second time from the proxy server 36 to the visiting computer 32. In addition, path (C) generally has the longest latency because the peer server 24 is typically hosted in a user's home equipped with a cable modem or DSL that has an uplink speed (path C) much slower that the downlink speed (path B). Thus, users may experience a significant delay when viewing images that are routed through the proxy server 36 due to the bandwidth limitations between the peer server 24 and the proxy server 36 path (C).
Accordingly, there is need for a method and system for reducing the amount of network traffic between the peer server and the proxy server (path (C)) in order to improve guest image viewing performance. The present invention addresses such a need.